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There are many wonderful things about my new apartment. It is in a fantastic location: right off Smith St, 2 blocks from a real, live, not-Key Food grocery store, in an area where people (restaurants, FreshDirect!) will deliver things. At less than half the size of my old place, my meager belongings look cozy and well-decorated. It has many cute nooks and crannies for storage. I want to marry the beautiful, huge stove with the wee, slim storage space beside the oven and the wide area between the left and right side burners - room for a trivet! Possibly shaped like a rooster!

There is also the unbelievable luxury of transferring at Jay for just one stop (current cockfarmer MTA issues aside), or, when it's more than 1 degree, not transferring at all and just walking home from Hoyt-Schermerhorn! I still love Smith-9th in theory, but the daily experience of the 500 often unworking escalators and the standing outside in the brutal, Chicago-like wind and the walk from the station, down the street, under the overpass, along the highway, over the river and through the fucking woods was enough to make me skip going home at all most nights. Thankfully the idea of staying at his house all the damn time was just as appealing to Chris - who can walk to and from work. Such a rare NYC perk, a precious, precious jewel. (Luckily the new routine of spending at least half the week here in Carroll Gardens is just as appealing through the presence of nearly all our friends living within a few blocks of my new place. South Brooklyn, it's what's for dinner.)

The most wonderful thing of all, however, may be the apartment management. It seems a small part of the Easy Livin' pie, but as anyone who's had a shitty landlord knows, they can make a palace feel like a prison. My old landlord wasn't a total asshole, mostly just a lazy slackass. In the last months of living there I started to suspect the lazy was intentional though, in that "I'm trying to make you quit so I don't have to fire you" sorta way. I mean, how strange is it that when the hell neighbors moved out in May 04 he gutted the apt (leading to El Dia de los Cucarachas) then let it sit there, empty and torn apart, as it still remained when I moved out in Dec? And he also didn't refill the apartment below me, when they moved out? (Which left me with no neighbors across or below me for almost 6 months. I really shoulda had that rave). Also, here we are 2 months after I've moved and do I have my security deposit back yet? Haaaaaaaa. Ha.

So here, in the new place, I have had so far 2 interactions with the management. The first was when I called to have my stove looked at. I (or, really, Chris) had been happily cooking up a storm on the stove for days when I first tried to use the oven. It had a not so fresh smell that wasn't gas, but more like dead, rotting corpse. We searched the inside, underside, backside and found a whole bunch of mouse poop, but even after cleaning that up and Easy Off-ing the oven it was still rank. (As an aside, this place was empty for a couple of weeks, tops. Did the previous tenant never use the oven or what?) So I called up the landlord and she sent over her husband who 1)cleaned out more mouse poo, 2) moved the stove and found a dead mouse (ew!) then 3) disposed of Mickey, re-cleaned everything and while leaving with the mouse garbage, 4) also took out my regular bag of trash. Swoon.

Then. Yesterday afternoon. I'm couchridden with a cold, hopped up on Theraflu, watching endless reruns of CSI. There is a knock on the door and it's Mr. Landlord: "Can I install a carbon monoxide detector in your apt?" As a matter of fact, yes you can. I immediately called MB to let her know her wildest dream had come true and now her daughter would be safe, safe at last! Dad answered the phone and I told him the news and he says: "Now you're one up on us. Actually, we don't have a CO or a smoke detector anymore."

!!!!!!!!!!!!

The hypocrisy! She and my sister are smokers! Who have an unreasonable amount of candles! I am a non-smoker who lives in one room. Oh, the humanity. MB's on my list.

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